Featured Exhibitions

Becoming John Marin: Modernist at Work introduces the AAC’s important new collection of works by John Marin (1870-1953), given by the artist’s daughter-in-law, Norma Marin. Modernist at Work will bring the viewer inside the artistic process of one of America's outstanding modern artists. Marin is best known for his luminous watercolors of rural Maine and urban New York. This exhibition invites viewers to look over the artist’s shoulder as he created and honed the private sketches he would interpret into completed watercolors and etchings. The show follows the evolution of Marin’s style and methods as he transformed from intuitive draftsman to innovative modernist watercolorist and etcher.

Special Exhibitions

A Luminous Line: Forty Years of Metalpoint Drawings by Susan Schwalb surveys the career of an artist who is crucial in reviving and redefining the ancient media of silverpoint and drawing with other metals. Schwalb has taken these traditional Renaissance media into the realm of abstraction, while retaining their beauty and serenity.

Museum School Gallery

In this exhibition, Arkansas Arts Center Museum School Jewelry & Small Metals Department Chair Jann Greenland shares her perspective on resources and possibilities. She combines the ordinary with the precious, the found with the fabricated, and the imaginary with the real.

AAC Collection

Throughout the year the Arkansas Arts Center displays works from its own collection. The galleries described below are filled with objects selected dating from over 600 years of Western art right up to the current day. The Arkansas Arts Center Foundation Collection specializes in drawings and contemporary craft, but there are also examples of paintings, sculpture, prints, photography, and decorative arts, among other media.

The scintillating watercolors and drawings of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French artist Paul Signac are the focus of two intimate galleries at the Arkansas Arts Center that have recently been redesigned and reinstalled. These works come from America’s finest collection of Signac’s graphic art, one hundred and thirty-three works that were assembled by Arkansan industrialist James T. Dyke. Mr. Dyke presented this magnificent collection to the Arkansas Arts Center in 1999.